Sometimes the best way to understand a presidential administration’s program is not what its officials say, but how it spends its money. This becomes more vivid during a government shutdown, when the White House can deem some government services nonessential and therefore suspended. During the first shutdown of President Donald Trump’s second term, one thing has been blisteringly clear: It believes not only that expelling undocumented migrants from the country is essential business, but also that it should come at potentially great cost to human life.
A new Washington Post report compares how much — or how little — different parts of the government have shuttered since the shutdown began last week. The Environmental Protection Agency already has sent home about 89% of its staff, and the Education Department furloughed 87% of its staff. But the Department of Homeland Security, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is expected to furlough merely 8% of its staff. Reuters separately reports that only 5% of DHS staff members have been furloughed so far. The only federal agencies that are sending home smaller fractions of their staffs, according to the Post, are the Treasury Department and Veterans Affairs.
The Trump administration is still detaining immigrants, but it has sent home the people who make sure that detention sites are safe.
A DHS planning document offers several different justifications for keeping DHS employees. By far the largest share are jobs deemed “necessary to protect life and property.” Other rationales include performing activities “expressly authorized” or “necessarily implied” by law.
Whatever the reason, those employees are helping keep the gears of immigration enforcement turning: “Officers continue to arrest migrants; detention centers remain fully operational; and the government issued new contracts for additional migrant holding facilities just last week,” the Post reports. But there are notable exceptions. The Office of Detention Oversight, which inspects detention centers to make sure they comply with federal standards for the safe and humane treatment of migrants, has been furloughed. And the Post found that officials overseeing ICE’s civil rights and privacy divisions “all sent automated messages saying they would ‘return to duty upon conclusion of the funding hiatus.’”
In short, the Trump administration is still detaining immigrants, but it has sent home the people who make sure that detention sites are safe and the people who help protect immigrants’ civil rights. And these furloughs come after DHS has already eliminated multiple internal watchdog agencies. “The cruelty is the point,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote of the first Trump administration, and those words remain true when it comes to the second administration’s treatment of immigrants.
The cruelty is already taking a toll: NOTUS reported that ICE had one of its “deadliest years on record in fiscal year 2025,” with 21 immigrants dying in the agency’s detention centers across the country. (Three of those deaths occurred from Oct. 1 of last year to Jan. 20, while Joe Biden was still president; the 18 deaths other took place under Trump.) While the causes of death have not been released for most of those detainees, the average age was 45 years old, and at least three died by suicide. More broadly, reports of unbearable living conditions are widespread. “Ninety percent of ICE’s detention centers are run by privately-owned companies that have been criticized for overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions,” NOTUS reported. “Immigration lawyers have raised alarms about increased risk for suicide, saying detainees are forced to go without medication, sleep on bare floors and eat rotten food.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has held up “Alligator Alcatraz” — which was winding down in September after a court ruled it had violated federal environmental law but is now reportedly being revived after an appellate panel put a hold on that order — as a model for detention centers across the country. According to The Hill, detainees previously complained about “maggot-filled food, flooding floors, insects everywhere, and poorly functioning air conditioning.” A former employee at the detention center described the cages people were kept in as “an oversized kennel.” But Noem has touted the Florida detention center as a “message” to deter immigrants, effectively admitting that the brutal nature of its detainment was deliberate. In response to an inquiry about the closure of the Office of Detention Oversight, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the Post, “We hope Democrats will open up the government swiftly so that this office can resume its work.” That statement appears to imply that this is the doing of the Democrats, rather than accepting responsibility for keeping certain parts of ICE running and taking other parts offline. In reality, the shutdown appears to be distilling the Trump administration’s immigration agenda to its essence.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
